Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of President Obama's health-care law, conservatives are paying close attention to the composition of the Senate, knowing that their last chance to overturn the law is with a Republican president and a Senate majority.

But looking at the Senate landscape, the odds of Republicans taking back the upper chamber are no better than 50-50, even with more Democratic seats in play, a favorable political environment, and an energized GOP base. It's not the often-maligned Mitt Romney campaign that's going to drag down the ticket; it's several of the candidates themselves.

Indeed, in many key states where Romney is favored or running competitively, the Republican Party is saddled with candidates who have underwhelmed on the campaign trail. In Florida and Ohio, where the president's numbers are mediocre and Democratic senators are vulnerable, Republicans could miss out on golden opportunities. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, two states looking increasingly winnable for Romney, the Republican Senate challengers have been unable to exploit their opponents' vulnerabilities. Even in conservative North Dakota, the party backed a Republican member of Congress with enough baggage to make the race surprisingly competitive against a well-liked, well-known former Democratic state attorney general.

To be sure, Republicans have some solid Senate candidates. The party recruited several standouts, like former New Mexico Rep. Heather Wilson and former Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle, who have put Democratic-leaning states in play. And Democrats face several of their own recruiting fumbles, including Nevada Rep. Shelley Berkley, who is now being investigated by the House Ethics Committee over whether she advanced legislation to benefit her husband's business. But if Republicans fail to take the Senate, it's going to be because of the glaring missed opportunities in the perennial battlegrounds and Republican-leaning states. If 2010 was the year the Tea Party cost the GOP several winnable seats, then 2012 could be the year Republicans' own candidates cost them control of the Senate.

Compare this cycle's recruits with their counterparts from the 2010 freshman Senate class, which includes three vice presidential prospects for Romney -- Rob Portman of Ohio, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire -- plus Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and John Hoeven of North Dakota. Much attention focused on the weak Tea Party-aligned candidates who lost last year, like Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada. But overall, the National Republican Senatorial Committee recruited a strong and deep roster of candidates in the last cycle.

Mandel, the Republican standard-bearer in Ohio, is an example of a candidate whose promise hasn't matched his performance. Party officials recruited the highly-touted state treasurer and encouraged him to enter the race very early so he could raise as much money as possible to keep financial pace with Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown's flush campaign account. In hindsight, Mandel's decision to jump in before he was politically ready was a significant miscalculation.

Despite filing papers to become a Senate candidate back in June 2011, Mandel studiously avoided the press during his exploratory phase, and ended up alienating many of the reporters assigned to cover him. He's gotten relentlessly bad press as a 31-year-old newbie who neglected his duties as treasurer to run for the Senate, and his campaign team has been flat-footed in handling damage control.

When Mandel took an unannounced trip to the Bahamas in March to raise money from payday lenders, the speech earned him a slew of bad headlines and gave Brown fodder for future campaign ads. With millions of dollars of super PAC money being spent on the race already, the relentless fundraising pace was probably unnecessary, and it came at the expense of a bunch of negative headlines back home. The latest Quinnipiac poll shows Mandel losing ground to Brown, and his unfavorables going up. If Romney carries the battleground state but Mandel falls short, it will be a serious missed opportunity for Republicans.

Florida is another state that is looking promising for Romney but challenging for Senate Republicans. The expected nominee is Mack, whose campaign has gotten off to a shaky start. He has struggled to win over the conservative rank-and-file, and has been openly criticized by the Florida GOP consultant class. His fundraising is are weak and not expected to improve with the release of his second-quarter numbers this month.
Florida Republican insiders argue that the political environment is so tough for Democrats that Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson should be almost as vulnerable as Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Jon Tester in Montana. Even as polling shows Nelson running slightly ahead of Mack, the pessimism in GOP circles about the challenger's campaign is palpable.

Meanwhile, in North Dakota, a contest once viewed as a shoo-in now looks like a surprisingly competitive race between Berg and former state Attorney General Heidi Heitkamp. The latest independent poll from Mason Dixon, conducted in June, shows Heitkamp leading Berg, 47 percent to 46 percent, a result consistent with internal polling on both sides. Crossroads GPS has spent nearly $1 million to bolster Berg's campaign in a race it hadn't expected to focus on.

Republicans credit the closeness of the contest to Heitkamp's personal likability and are optimistic that Berg will ultimately prevail once voters learn more about her views. But North Dakota is a famously close-knit state where voters know their representatives well and support their preferred candidate over straight-ticket voting. For many years, until 2008, the state boasted an all-Democratic congressional delegation even as it handily supported Republicans at the presidential level.

Like Mandel, Berg has taken heat for angling for a promotion so quickly after winning the House seat. His unfavorable ratings are unusually high for a first-term representative, in part because he's had trouble connecting with voters -- a "grocery-store problem," as one Democratic strategist working on the race put it. His support of the budget proposal from Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin could hurt him in a state with one of the highest concentration of senior citizens in the country. All told, the race is closer than anyone expected it to be.

Finally, Michigan and Pennsylvania were never considered first-tier opportunities for the GOP, but if there was a year to defeat Democratic Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Bob Casey, this would be it. Both are saddled with politically unpopular votes on health care and energy policy, and both states are chock full of white, blue-collar voters disillusioned with President Obama. Romney could win both states. But Stabenow and Casey remain in solid shape, thanks to their opponents' lackluster campaigns.

In Michigan, former Rep. Pete Hoekstra kicked off his campaign on a down note, airing a Super Bowl ad attacking Stabenow on spending that was widely panned for being racially insensitive - and his campaign has struggled to regain its footing since. A June EPIC/MRA poll showed Obama and Romney in a dead heat, but with Stabenow leading Hoekstra by 12 percentage points, 49 percent to 37 percent. He also faces a competitive primary against Clark Durant, who has a fighting chance at an upset, and could make a better general election candidate.

In Pennsylvania, Casey still holds solid favorable ratings, but the political terrain seems welcoming for a credible GOP challenger who could exploit Obama's weaknesses. The party's nominee, Tom Smith, has the ability to self-finance to the tune of millions of dollars but has done little advertising, and he doesn't have the political skill set that, say, a Rep. Pat Meehan would bring to the table.

Even with these limitations, Republicans still have even odds to retake control because Democrats are defending more seats, with many races taking place in conservative states. The GOP is favored to pick up seats in Nebraska and Missouri, and has advantages in Montana and North Dakota, thanks to the states' Republican leanings. There are a sufficient number of open-seat races to tip the balance in Republicans' favor. That could be all that's necessary to win a Senate majority if Romney wins and the party manages to hold onto nearly all of its own seats. But it's an awfully narrow margin for error, which could have been prevented with a few good candidates to run against vulnerable Democratic senators.

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

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We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

After the Times ran a column giving employers tips on how to deal with Millennials (for example, they need regular naps) (I didn't read the article; that's from my experience), Slate's Amanda Hess pointed out that the examples the Times used to demonstrate their points weren't actually Millennials. Some of the people quoted in the article were as old as 37, which was considered elderly only 5,000 short years ago.

The age of employees of The Wire, the humble website you are currently reading, varies widely, meaning that we too have in the past wondered where the boundaries for the various generations were drawn. Is a 37-year-old who gets text-message condolences from her friends a Millennial by virtue of her behavior? Or is she some other generation, because she was born super long ago? (Sorry, 37-year-old Rebecca Soffer who is a friend of a friend of mine and who I met once! You're not actually that old!) Since The Wire is committed to Broadening Human Understanding™, I decided to find out where generational boundaries are drawn.